MEDICAL GAS SERVICES Broadened its offering


Rob McCrea added: “Medical Gas Services subsequently broadened its offering when we started undertaking a lot of training, including nurse and porter training in safe use of medical gases. However, at that point we were restricting the majority of our business to the north-east of England. We were still based out of Rochdale, but moved in 2012 to larger offices in the Lancashire town.”


Within 2-3 years, Medical Gas Services had grown to serve a national customer base, including taking on an NHS Property Services national contract, to the extent that, by 2015, the business was looking after the medical gas needs of over 450 different UK healthcare premises. These included acute hospitals, doctors’ surgeries, and primary care centres. “At that point,” Rob McCrea explained, “Medical Gas Services was sub- contracting all the maintenance work out to other companies, since the staff we had at the time didn’t have the necessary maintenance expertise. We were tending instead to undertake safety and compliance audits, ensuring that the maintenance was undertaken correctly, and raising Permits to Work.” He added: “In addition to the hospitals we serve, there are about 300 health centres in the UK equipped with piped medical gas, a small number with step-down and elderly care wards attached. At this stage, due to a growth in demand, we increased our headcount to 15, still centrally managed from Rochdale. We were employing engineers trained to AP level, and were still continuing the AE work.”


Three principal offices John Rhodes, a highly experienced engineer and estates management professional, later joined Medical Gas Services, further boosting its capabilities. Rob McCrea explained that the group of companies he and Michael George now own has three principal offices to serve different parts of the UK – a head office in Normanton in Yorkshire, close to his home, an office in Newcastle, and one in Harlow, serving the south and south-east


holiday, and subsequently, to Medical Gas Services becoming the ‘recognised company’ within St Lucia to manage and equip all the island’s healthcare facilities with medical gas equipment. “From this encounter,” he explained, “our relationship with the American medical gas community has led to me undergoing training in the US medical standards. In turn, we are working with a number of American Health organisations to develop what they are dubbing ‘a Harmonious Standard for Medical Gases’ in the US, introducing some of our British Standard methodology of work into America.”


A major change Adam Clark servicing a terminal unit.


of England. He said: “We opened the new head office in Normanton just off the M62, in 2017, and the Newcastle office and Harlow office in Essex in 2018. The three offices are managed by Michael Sayers, Wayne Badkin, and Adam Clark respectively. We continued to expand Medical Gas Services from about 2016 onwards, recruiting skilled medical gas engineering professionals with a background in both installation and maintenance, including some from the NHS. Overall, Medical Gas Services now employs 19 staff .”


Database writer


In 2016, Medical Gas Services recruited a full-time database writer, Mark Rhodes, to, as Rob McCrea put it, ‘bring the company into the 21st century’ – previously it had had to handle a ‘growing mountain’ of paperwork. He said: “When we first recruited Mark, John’s son, we didn’t realise quite how beneficial his input would be. We can now, for instance, see live auditing, manage work very efficiently, and give our clients access to our data to see their records, which we hold indefinitely.”


Stephen Hutchings repairing a local alarm panel.


64 Health Estate Journal May 2020


Bringing things up to date, Rob McCrea explained that Medical Gas Services, and the associated businesses, continued to grow their clientele, and, in the past five years, MGS has continued to expand its medical gas training for nurses and porters particularly. He said: “In broader terms, we still undertake a large volume of medical safety training for NHS staff. Interestingly,” he added, “while on holiday in 2015 in the Caribbean, I got into conversation with an American medical engineer, Jonathan Willard, the MD of a company called Acute Medical in Boston, who was in St Lucia looking at the medical gas system in a new hospital which he didn’t feel had been installed very well. Jonathan is also an NPFA (the US’s National Fire Protection Agency) instructor on the America standards.” The discussion led to Rob McCrea visiting the hospital in question during the


Focusing on Medical Gas Services’ development in the past two years, Rob McCrea said: “The company massively changed in 2018. Having principally mainly offered AE and AP services until that point, in 2018 we were badly let down by one of our sub-contractors, and had to get all our staff together to fulfil a maintenance contract at a large acute hospital. We undertook the work, effectively on an emergency basis, and the hospital told us it was extremely pleased with the way we had completed the job, which they said was a significant improvement on what had been undertaken previously. This experience resulted in our decision to move into medical gas maintenance and installation. With the staff we had on board, we had a great mix of installation and maintenance engineers, and in 2018, recruited the senior medical gas engineer from Atlas Copco, Steve Hutchings, to run our maintenance operation from our Harlow office. In 2019, we won the King’s College Hospital tender for medical gas maintenance, and the Maintenance Division has continued to grow ever since.”


Medical gas maintenance Medical Gas Services now provides medical gas system maintenance at eight hospitals across England. Rob McCrea said: “The King’s College Hospital London contract entails maintaining equipment both at the Trust’s main site in Denmark Hill, and at two others in Farnborough and Orpington in Kent. The Denmark Hill campus is by far the biggest site, and indeed this was our biggest ever overall contract win. We won the five-year contract based on the quality of our tender, rather than price.” The day after I met him, Rob McCrea was due to have a meeting at a new hospital under construction close to Buckingham Palace in London which will be operated by America’s Cleveland Clinic.


Today, alongside offering AE and AP services, Medical Gas Services also provides services including CP maintenance and installation, training, and


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